Y Ceffyl Tywyll:  the dark horse 

The only photo image that I could find of James Ramsey Fleming.
Left to right: Nellie, Minnie, James holding is daughter Dorothy-Mae, in front, the 
three Fleming brothers, Olive and James Orr.  

                James Ramsey Fleming, for me, is where history meets rumor meets legend.  Finding the fine line that separates the three versions of "truth" is, to say the least, a challenge.  Especially when the subject of the story kind of spun his own tale depending on who was listening.  

        The one and only time that my own father, Kelvin Orr Fleming, mentioned Uncle Jim was when I was paging through some of the old family photo albums and found a faded image of a slim, dark gentleman kneeling next to a very find looking car from the late twenties or the early thirties.  I pointed at the photo and asked my dad who had owned the classic cruiser.

    "Uncle Jim".....and that was the end of the conversation. Not a word beyond that.

    I would be nearly twenty years before I heard about James Ramsey again.

    My uncle Ormond was the next person to tell us about James Ramsey and it was quite a story. 

    I will expand with my version of the story.  I'm not positive that this is word for word what Ormond told us, but I cannot let fear of historical plasticity interfere with a good story.

    Uncle Orm, (Ormond....remember that name, it's coming back later) never drove much; he tended to take public transit in the city and Greyhound for longer trips.  It was on one of these longer trips, heading up to Vernon where my father lived at the time, that Orm ran across a ghost.

    Ormond sat down on the long-haul bus and his seat mate was a very elderly but vaguely familiar gentleman.  The gentleman sat next to Orm, peering sharply at him in the dim of the bus. The attention was hard to ignore, so Orm finally asked him if he could do anything for him.

    "I know you...you're Ormond....Ormond Fleming." quipped his neighbor.

    It took a moment, but Ormond finally realized that he was talking to his estranged uncle James Ramsey.  It had been decades since anyone had heard from him and the family had kind of assumed James was dead.

    Anyone that has traveled on a Greyhound bus knows that every trip takes forever.  Whistle stops every other turn, long lay-overs to allow for some exercise, toilet breaks and food.  A 6 hour trip can stretch to 12 hours or more and you will see every small town you never knew existed.

    This trip was no different, but it probably passed quickly because James Ramsey spoke about his past with spectacular candor.

    Ormond left us all a letter; a link to a ghost nobody remembered. 

    James should be remembered.

    James Ramsey was the first born child of James Orr and Nellie.  By all accounts, both James Senior and Nellie doted on both of their sons, but "First Born" often comes with perks. James Ramsey might have had a terribly long leash and he certainly seemed to take advantage of that long-line. {post publication correction:  James was born 1892 while William was born 1890, making him the elder brother.  Maybe James was acting up as the "second son"?  I assumed Bill was younger simply because his years of service were much later than James'.  It turns out that Bill served for two years as a cadet trainer prior to shipping out}

    James lived life on the edge.  In fact, it looks like James' edge was just as sharp at the turn of the last century as it would be now.  He liked his drink, he liked gambling, he had fighting dogs and, according to his military induction forms he picked up a tattoo on his right fore-arm (a heart with a dagger pierced through it...typical American traditional, probably chosen from a standard flash off a dingy tattoo parlor wall).  There was also a mention of a small scar on the corona of his penis acquired due to a "venereal morbidity" in 1913.  

    One finds the strangest things when we dig up the historical records that everyone was sure were dead, buried and rotting in their archive.

Signing up; his mother chased the bus in tears as he left.

Note the tattoo on his fore-arm.  Tattoos were definitely NOT
in fashion in those years.

That little note one line up from the bottom tells of a 
different life lived.

    James Ramsey told quite a tale that night on the bus.  He spoke of war crimes, low and high, and court martial that got him drummed out of the army while the war still raged all around them.  I suspect the truth is somewhere mixed up in all the mess.

    James spoke of his time in the trenches of Western Front. He boasted that the Canadian forces never took prisoners; they just killed everything they came across.  James spoke of "mail call"; the Canadians would push prisoners into a handy trench-side armory or gun emplacement and toss a couple of grenades in as they slammed the door shut.  Killing prisoners of war was not necessarily illegal at the time, but it was still considered barbaric behavior.

    James had lost his right thumb and the tip of his right index finger sometime during the war; he claimed that he got it from releasing a grenade a bit too late while "delivering the mail".  

    James also laughed about his "court martial" on his exit from the army.  It seems he was brought up on charges of desertion, an offense punishable by death before a firing squad. Once in court, James laughed off the desertion charge with the quip: "I wasn't deserting, I was drunk and disorderly. You can't shoot a man for getting himself locked up in the Queen's jail (Glasgow)".  And indeed, you cannot really shoot a man for being a drunk in an insane world.  But you can court martial him for self-injury.

    So I dug through the military documents fairly extensively.  The story about grenades and prisoners and courts martial are all extensions of the truth.  

    From the actual court martial of James Ramsey Fleming we get a bit of truth. Maybe the whole truth.

    James was a lowly private and, as such, he was not really qualified to handle enemy ordinance such as grenades and the such.  It seems that James and his friend Brown had disassembled one of the new German goose-egg grenades recently introduced to the battlefield (no idea where the two had got it from) and had kept the detonator from the grenade as a souvenir of their adventures.  

    At the time of the accident they two appeared to be pulling the detonator apart so each could have half to take home.

    The problem being is that the detonators were activated by pulling on a friction cord to ignite the triggering charge. 

    The resulting explosion managed to remove two fingers from each of the miscreants and, it seems, both got exactly what they were hoping for: a lasting souvenir and a trip home

An eye-witness account.

The final decision: no disciplinary action necessary.

The schematics: it was a friction trigger standard to the grenades of the day.
it was HIGHLY likely that James knew exactly how they worked because the trigger was standard issue.
It was the grenade shape and size that was new.  The trigger just unscrewed from the unit.

They were small and could be thrown up to 40 meters easily.

I think his CO wanted blood in the water.

    I will take a little "side-bar" here to address the white elephant in the room: killing unarmed prisoners of war.

    This was done pretty much by all combatants in every war ever fought.  You killed the enemy or you ended up feeding the enemy and you never really could relax as long as those prisoners breathed, so you stopped that breathing business expediently.     Essentially, you applied the 3-S rule: shoot them, shovel the dirt (over them) and shut the hell up. 

Because killing unarmed prisoners has never really been kosher at any time.

    Apocryphally, the Canadian soldiers did garner a reputation for savagery, though now days it's hard to separate reality from urban legend.  Beyond James Ramsey's idle boasts, there are any number of unsubstantiated references to the effect that Canadians did not war well with others.  We had a very simplistic view of war: kill the enemy with no holds barred.

    The English poet Robert Graves, in his best selling work published in 1929 "Goodbye to All" said "the troops that had the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners of war were the Canadians".  Certainly Wade Davis, in his history of the post war Everest Expeditions "Into the SIlence" spoke of the enmity the famous Mallory had for his Canadian team member and inferred that it was due to the Canadian barbarity during the war.   The Canadian chief commander Arthur Currie was quoted as staying that "his troops prided themselves on killing the enemy wherever and whenever they could"

Arthur Currie

    Certainly there is some logic to just killing the prisoners when you are fighting in a rabbit warren of mud filled trenches and possibly miles from the rear-command.  A sixteen year old private, Archie McWade wrote home that his commander had told them to "remember, no prisoners, they will just eat your rations".  An officer, CV Williams wrote " The Canadians rarely take prisoners;  they take them to some quiet spot and then it's a case of the dead may march after".

    Some of the barbaric reputation of the Canadians probably flowed directly from their commanding officer Arthur Currie.  After the war he spoke at a banquet dinner and said " War is simply the curse of butchery and men who have gone through it, who have seen war stripped on all it's trappings are the last men who will want to see another war". 

     Currie himself was an open proponent of the now outlawed poison gas that was used in WWI (typically mustard gas) .  While the Germans were the first to use the poison gas (and the Canadian troops were among the first to be exposed to the battle field use of poisonous gas), the Canadians were among the first  adopt regular use of mustard gas in the field.  Currie, again, was quoted as saying "If we could have killed the whole German army by gas, we would have gladly done so".

    To this day there are historians that claim that many of the 1929 revisions of the Geneva Conventions were based on the Canadian savagery in the trenches.  

    Being polite and being nice are often two different things.

    I'm not completely convinced that Canadians were all that barbaric and I don't really think the Geneva Conventions were re-written with our country in mind, but I think the legend of the Canadian savage storm-troopers served the newly mustered colonial soldiers quite well.  It brought their general street cred up among the allied ranks and, seriously, it's a benefit if the very thought of a Canadian invasion made the German soldiers wet their pants and run like hell.

    I rather doubt that any of the armies on either side were particularly civilized; WWI was barbarism taken to the human extreme. Millions of men lobbing bombs and bullets from mud filled trenches, making little or no strategic advances over months or years of bitter opposition. That sort of thing tends to make for some extra-ordinary barbarism; real medieval stuff without any chivalry.

    Just about everything from here on in is based on about three short paragraphs from Ormond's letter.  There was a few high points that could be expanded on.

    The overlying theme is that Uncle James was that he was "one tough hombre"  (an actual quote from Orm).  His face had taken some structural alterations from numerous fist fights; and he earned all of those scars.  It was the best of times to be a tough guy with very specific set of skills.  There was the whole prohibition thing: a spotty thing in Canada, but definitely a long term commitment to the Americans.  And somebody had to run that booze across the border.

    There there was the slow creep of socialism and communism...well, more like unionization.  There were strikes and scab labor and the odd guy that was good with a steel pipe in a tight spot.  James Ramsey was good in a tight spot.  Not a good guy really, just good in a tight spot.

    Somehow James managed to work himself into government job: he became the body-guard for the Attorney General of British Columbia, Gordon Wismer.  I have a hard time picturing any government official in Canada EVER actually needing hard-boned Welshman as a body guard, but then those post-war years were when organized crime really took root, driven, of course, by prohibition.  There is a high likelihood that Gordon Wismer, in the boom of twenties Vancouver, was either a made man with the gangs or a target of the gangs.....or both.

    New Years Eve 1927 James and Minnie were in car crash that killed Minnie ( I found her coroner's record).  There was little doubt that James was DWI and he should have been charged, but his connections with Wismer and the Liberal Party got him a ride home with the officers.  Or maybe it was his connections with the mob.  Who knows?  Orm merely called him "well connected" without expanding on the topic.

    I have no idea what happened to Dorothy-Mae.  Maybe she was in the car and died with her mother, maybe James continued on as a single father or maybe Dorothy-Mae was farmed out to some unknown family.  I tried to "Google"  Dorothy-Mae and there are indeed many Dorothy Flemings out there, but tracking down our Dorothy-Mae is beyond my computer skills.

    The last mention of James Ramsey is Ormond and him sharing overnight lodging in Vernon BC in 1946....and the famous bus ride.

    I tried "Googling" James Ramsey Fleming numerous times and, truthfully, the only real references I found were in the military records.  We know he was born in Toronto, October 27, 1892.  We know about his WWI service and we have a few rumors about his life after the war.  Nothing about his death.

    A very few people will be remembered long after they pass, but we really should remember our own, even if James was "not a nice man".